Rhabdias breviensis Nascimento, Gonçalves, Melo, Giese, Furtado & Santos, 2013

Aguiar, Aline, Morais, Drausio Honorio, Firmino Silva, Lidiane A., Anjos, Luciano Alves Dos, Foster, Ottilie Carolina & Silva, Reinaldo José Da, 2021, Biodiversity of anuran endoparasites from a transitional area between the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado biomes in Brazil: new records and remarks, Zootaxa 4948 (1), pp. 1-41 : 13

Rhabdias breviensis Nascimento, Gonçalves, Melo, Giese, Furtado & Santos, 2013

Hosts (prevalence; range): L. mystacinus (2/8; 2–14), P. centralis (2/35; 1), R. diptycha (2/21; 2–11), and S. fuscovarius (1/51; 3).

Site of infection: lungs.

Stage: adult.

Type host and type locality: Leptodactylus petersii (Steindachner) , Breves , Marajó Island, Pará State, Brazil .

Comments: the specific identification based on morphology is very complicated due to the conserved characters of Rhabdias spp. and some confusion that occurs by the lack of standardization of terms in features used to identify the species ( Kuzmin et al. 2003; Kuzmin et al. 2007; Martínez‐ Salazar 2008). The latest studies (eg. Santos et al. 2011; Morais et al. 2017; Muller et al. 2018) showed us the need to incorporate Scanning Electron Microscopy and molecular tools for accurate identification. There are approximately 80 nominal species of Rhabdias associated with amphibians and reptiles distributed in the tropical‐ temperate regions of the world being 15 from Neotropical Realm ( Kuzmin 2013; Muller et al. 2018). Rhabdias spp. are characterized by inflated body cuticle and variations on the arrangement of cephalic structures which can be: a) six lips uniform in shape and size; b) four submedian lips and two lateral pseudolabia; c) four lips as protuberances and two lateral pseudolabia; d) no lips but two pseudolabia; and e) without lips (Tkack et al. 2014). Here, we identified R. breviensis mainly by molecular analyses conducted in a previous study published by Muller et al (2018). We resorted to molecular tools because we were not able to observe all diagnostic morphologic features such as cephalic structures (four submedian and two lateral lips; two pairs of submedian and one pair of lateral cephalic papillae) used to distinguish the species. Leptodactylus mystacinus and P. centralis constitute new records for R. breviensis while R. diptycha and S. fuscovarius were recorded by Muller et al. (2018).